NASA's Cassini spacecraft has measured a curious abundance of methane spewing into the atmosphere of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus. A team of American and French scientists published findings in Geophysical Re ...

On Feb. 16, an international group of researchers proposed new hypotheses about some unusual plumes spotted by amateur astronomers on Mars in 2012. The plumes were seen rising to altitudes of over 250 km ...

When Galileo viewed Jupiter through his telescope in 1610, he saw four dim objects near it that he assumed were stars. Repeated observations revealed that these "stars" orbited Jupiter like our own moon circles ...

Volcanic ash poses a significant hazard for areas close to volcanoes and for aviation. For example, the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, Iceland, clearly demonstrated that even small-to-moderate explosive ...

The most recent eruption on the Canary Islands – at El Hierro in 2011 – produced spectacularly enigmatic white "floating rocks" that originated from the layers of oceanic sedimentary rock underneath the island. An international ...

The Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010 went on for 87 days. The breached underwater well pumped out an estimated 210 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Monitoring technology allowed responders ...

Spectacular eruptions at Bárðarbunga volcano in central Iceland have been spewing lava continuously since Aug. 31. Massive amounts of erupting lava are connected to the destruction of supercontinents and ...

A UC Santa Barbara geochemist studying Samoan volcanoes has found evidence of the planet's early formation still trapped inside the Earth. Known as hotspots, volcanic island chains such as Samoa can ancient ...

New data obtained by NASA's GRAIL mission reveals that the Procellarum region on the near side of the moon—a giant basin often referred to as the "man in the moon"—likely arose not from a massive asteroid ...